Very different towns
Very different towns
Regarding the controversy on “stirring the pot” (March 16, Your Views): What difference does it actually make whether Don Lemon got it right or Max Dible got it right or wrong?
In my opinion, “ain’t gonna change one darn thing!” Kailua-Kona is one town and Hilo is quite another, regardless of how they were alphabetically listed.
Kailua-Kona has much to offer. For example: choice airport (the airlines know where their revenue comes from), expensive housing, traffic congestion, numerous stores, large boat harbors from where tourists can charter boats for sightseeing or fishing, etc., first-class hotels, plenty of restaurants, and on and on.
Hilo offers very little in comparison. Thank goodness! We have a little-used first-class airport, which major airlines avoid for obvious reasons, the prime being lack of revenue coupled with tourists’ chosen destinations, few hotels and restaurants and, yes, “affordable housing” for those who choose to live here.
Incidentally (but not necessarily so), we presently are spending millions of dollars to upgrade Banyan Drive and adjacent properties. For what? To attract tourists who don’t come. Those who do arrive come by tourist ships and only stay a few hours.
In closing, leave Hilo alone! I have enjoyed my town for many years and prefer it as it is. If I want to mingle with the “well to do” and the free-spending tourists, I will drive to Kona, spend an exorbitant rate for a few hours parking and pay an exorbitant price to refill my gas tank to drive back to the town of my choice, Hilo.
Ron Baptista
Mountain View
Preserve funding
I was shocked to learn the president is proposing to eliminate federal support for after-school and summer learning programs. That funding is critical to children, families and communities, making it possible for about 1.6 million children in Hawaii and throughout the country to participate in after-school programs that keep them safe, inspire them to learn and help their working parents keep their jobs.
If the president succeeds in killing the 21st Century Community Learning Centers initiative, many of those children will have no safe, supervised place to go after the school day ends. They’ll be latchkey kids, on their own, on the streets, some getting involved in risky behaviors, and all losing the opportunity to be constructively engaged and learning under the watchful eye of caring adults.
Cutting funds for after school would cause real harm to children, families and communities. It’s up to Congress to make sure the president doesn’t succeed in killing federal after-school funding — and up to all of us to make sure our members of Congress know how much we all value after-school programs.
Paula Adams
Hawaii Afterschool Alliance